were slowest to show any ageing effects. The inter- 3.

3 UWA Pile Tests at Shenton Park

preted increase in ultimate shaft resistance after 12
months varies from a factor of 1.75 to 2.55, with
Larvik giving the lowest and Blessington the highest.
A number of pile test programmes were undertaken
by the University of Western Australia (UWA) at the
Shenton Park Test Site in Perth, Australia. This
sand, which is part of the Spearwood dune system, is
a uniformly graded, sub-angular to sub-rounded sili-
ceous sand with a mean particle size of 0.42 mm.
Static tension tests on a total of 26 driven and jacked
piles were conducted between 2005 and 2012 by
Schneider (2007) and Lim (2014). The water table at
Shenton Park is about 0.5 m above the interface of
the dune sand and underlying limestone, at approxi-
mately 6.5 m bgl, with the result that the sand is par-
tially saturated. Lehane et al. (2004) report that the
resulting soil suctions and therefore CPT qc values
varied seasonally. However, this qc variability was
confined to areas with vegetation and the pile test
sites were chosen to avoid these effects. The driven
and jacked piles were installed within 500 m of each
other and the CPT data in these two test areas are
shown in Figure 13. The qc values are seen to be var-
iable in the upper 1.5 m, becoming more uniform
and showing a tendency to increase linearly with
depth. The variability in the near surface CPT’s was
greatest at the location of the jacked pile tests. The
average CPT qc values over the length of the test
piles varied from 2.7 to 5.9 MPa.

Figure 12. Proposed curve-fitted capacity build-up with time

(after Karlsrud et al. 2014)

Repeated load tests on the same pile at both Lar-

vik and Ryggkollen showed a significantly lower ca-
pacity at the same time after pile installation than the
corresponding fresh tests. Karlsrud et al. (2014)
therefore warned against using repeated load testing
to failure as basis for addressing real time effects.
The piles subjected to sustained loading over 12
months before being loaded to failure also showed
less gain in capacity than the fresh piles. The gain af- (a)
ter 24 months dropped by a factor of respectively
1.42 (Larvik) and 1.16 (Ryggkollen). Karlsrud et al.
(2014) recommend that this aspect must be consid-
ered when applying time effects in design practice.
Further investigations are needed to assess how this
negative impact of sustained loading depends on the
level of sustained loading, and if it is any different
for piles loaded in compression as compared to the
tension loading applied in NGI’s tests.